


I Wasn't Made For This Peace

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Break Up, Break Up Talk, Disaster Date, F/M, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Post-War, Valentine's Day Disaster, Worst Valentine's Day Date Ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-17 04:14:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29587077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Harry, Ron, and Hermione have returned to Hogwarts for their Eighth Year. The looming prospect of adulthood fills Harry with uncertainty, especially when Kinglsey Shacklebolt denies his application to become an Auror, telling Harry that he needs more time to get over the events of the war and Voldemort's terror. A disastrous Valentine's Day date with Ginny forces Harry to confront that he needs to take some time off and find himself before diving back into battle.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Implied Future Harry Potter/Luna Lovegood
Kudos: 8





	I Wasn't Made For This Peace

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write a 'Valentine's Day date from Hell' story for Hinny for a long time. I thought it would be a humorous series of unfortunate events, but became a bit of a meditation about finding yourself, too. And, it has shades of a Harry/Luna pairing down the road. Enjoy!

“Relax!” Hermione advised cheerfully, and added, “You and Ginny have been alone together loads of times!”  
Harry gave a watery smile. Of course, he and Ginny had been alone together, outside of the gaze of their shared friend circle or the Weasley family, quite a few notable times. But, they had delved into each other’s mouths with their tongues, or taken each other’s tops off, lying in the sunwarmed grass by the lake on warm late spring afternoons. Harry had never taken Ginny on a date, but he was sure that required more cerebral forms of interaction: like conversation.  
As if reading his mind, Hermione said, “Honestly, a date is just a long conversation, during a meal. Pretend you’re at breakfast in the Great Hall…but alone.”  
“Why is the Great Hall empty? Where’s everyone gone? Have they been kidnapped? Did they oversleep?” Harry quipped.  
“Don’t worry about it, Sherlock Holmes. Just focus on Ginny,” Hermione said, and then glanced down at her watch. “I have to return that Arithmancy book to the library before it closes!”  
“Better run along, then. Thanks, Hermione,” Harry said.  
As she hurried out of the Common Room, Harry stared into the lashing golden flames of the fireplace. Harry rested his head in his hands, as thoughts tumbled in his head like laundry in a drying machine. He hadn’t thought twice about returning to Hogwarts to complete the Seventh Year of his magical education that had been deferred to hunt Horcruxes. The castle had magically regenerated from the damage of the battles that had been fought there. The students and faculty were also valiantly persevering, trying to return to normal life. Better than normal: after decades of Voldemort’s ominous presence in the collective psyche of the Wizarding World, it was finally free of the man. Scholarly discourse had been resumed with magical communities in other countries, and the younger students were fired up with enthusiasm to learn and innovate, to learn the craft of coding new spells and sharing them with wizards all over the globe to make the world better. The magical governments of the world were also galvanized to prevent future dark magic massacres, and advance the causes of equal rights between magical creatures and wizards, and create laws that rooted out the kind of institutionalized prejudices and corruption that led to Voldemort’s infiltration of the Ministry.  
It was an exciting time to be alive, and to be a wizard, but Harry didn’t quite know where he fit in. His application to be an Auror was met with two words from Kingsley Shacklebolt, who was moonlighting as both Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and acting Minister of Magic:  
“No, Potter.”  
Harry was thunderstruck. He had never expected that outcome, and it felt like a cruel joke.  
Kingsley, with a compassionate look in his dark eyes that Harry scorned for pity, elaborated,  
“You’ve been through too much. You need to clear your head before you start training. Its intensive. It gets to people, confronting that kind of darkness. A lot of trainees don’t make the cut.”  
“I will. I’ve faced worse,” Harry persisted.  
“That’s the point,” Kingsley countered.  
“Dumbledore trusted me,” Harry pointed out.  
“He trusted you to die for the cause. Aurors have to live for it, and that’s a heavy commitment. I’m not ruling you out, but I wouldn’t be doing you or anyone else any favors by letting you in now,” Shacklebolt had said, with a note of finality that made Harry feel humiliated on a new level. Dumbledore, Sirius, Lupin, even the Dursleys and Snape-they had all frustrated him, but no one had ever made him feel like a child. Kingsley had. A defective child spoiling to do a job too big for him.  
Harry stared at the flames, thinking of that conversation. The part that stuck with him the most was the bit about Dumbledore. What was the difference between dying for a cause and living for it? It felt like a riddle he had to figure out. He didn’t quite feel unwelcome at Hogwarts, but every day his education continued, he wondered just what he was going to do with it.  
The grandfather clock in the corner chimed four o’clock pm. He had to be at the carriages to Hogsmeade. He was meeting Ginny at the Fountain, a tea house he had never been to before, but was said to be less fusty than Madam Puddifoot’s. Harry rushed out of the common room, through the portrait hole, and down the grand staircases, to the consternation of a portrait of dancing nymphs who clearly found him graceless. That didn’t matter to him-as little as he knew about dating, he knew that being late would not be ideal. He ran dead smack into someone, and given the softness of their chest it was a girl. Feeling churlish, Harry scrambled to pick up the girl’s fallen books. When he looked up, he was staring into Luna’s pellucid, gray blue eyes.  
“Harry-are you rushing towards danger?” she said.  
Harry laughed. “No…although I never really had much luck with teahouses,” he said.  
“You must really be in need of a cuppa. Rough day studying? I always heard seventh year was a breeze,” Luna said.  
“Who told you that?” Harry said grimly.  
He had never felt so apprehensive. OWLS had been stressful, as had NEWT classes, but it was a different calibre of stress knowing that no new term of school would follow that last holiday, only the gaping maw of the rest of his life, and only his own fortune and resources to shape it.  
“No one in particular. I tend to overhear people having conversations with each other, because they rather forget that I’m there,” Luna said.  
Harry had known Luna long enough not to be phased by her tendency to take idioms literally, and he would always be fond of her for how much she had contributed to Dumbledore’s Army and the war against Voldemort.  
“What I mean is, its hard…knowing that after the year’s over, you won’t be coming back here, ever again,” Harry admitted.  
Luna looked understanding, and said, “Wizards aren’t meant to stay in one place very long, Harry. Wizard means ‘wise man’. Wise men have to leave home to look for knowledge, don’t they?”  
Harry sighed. “I’m not sure I want knowledge, Luna. Just…something to do,” Harry said.  
“You’ll have to learn what that is…and the knowledge of how to live life is knowledge, all the same,” Luna said.  
“Not much I can say to that. ‘Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure’, right?” Harry said bemusedly, remembering their first meeting on the train in his fourth year.  
“Quite!” Luna said, with an earnest nod.  
Harry smiled. Something about the conviction in her every word and gesture always managed to cheer him up.  
“Would you like to share a carriage to Hogsmeade? As friends?” she asked.  
Harry felt a stitch in his belly as he regarded the shining hope in his eyes. It was beautiful, like the lone star in a dark, cloudy night sky…and he had to put it out.  
“Erm…actually, I’m meeting Ginny. For a date. So, I should be alone, shouldn’t I? I talked about Hermione once on a date with Cho Chang, and she…” Harry meant to say ‘ripped him a new arsehole’, but settled on, “she didn’t like it very much.”  
“Oh, I see! I’ll be in the library, studying wandlore. Mr. Ollivander’s asked me to be his apprentice. I start in August!” she said.  
“Wow, Luna, that’s great!” Harry said.  
He was rewarded with a grateful smile. He was truly happy for Luna, and thankful that she didn’t respond the way his other classmates did after informing him of their upcoming apprenticeships: ask him if he’d heard about his Auror application, how things were coming along in that direction. Luna seemed to have a deep and unspoken faith that he’d be just fine, and it radiated from her pale eyes and silvery hair, and, as long as he was in her presence, it was contagious. He almost felt like he’d be okay, too.  
Harry took a Thestral pulled carriage alone. Ron and Hermione, who were officially dating, were no doubt spending their Valentine’s Day afternoon breaking all of Madam Pince’s rules about canoodling in the Restricted Section of the library.  
Harry had long feared that romance between them would divide their friendship forever in one nuclear, mother-of-all arguments, but their bickering had actually resolved itself into inside jokes and teasing banter. Ginny, of course, made a great sport of their new attitude, mocking them with her characteristic impressions. However, there were times when there was something too pure about them to mock-when they talked in low voices, looking into each other’s eyes, or casually touched each other, they radiated a kind of deep, true love that demanded respect and privacy from any onlookers. It reminded him of Cho and Cedric, which made his stomach stitch with a regret he didn’t understand. 

Snow was falling in fat drops as he walked up slight hill to the Fountain. Though it was only late afternoon, the sky was dark gray with low, swollen clouds, and streetlights shone through the flurries as if pointing the way to Narnia.  
“Harry!” Ginny called.  
He turned around. His green eyes met her light brown eyes, which shone through the tumult of snow. Her cheeks were red from cold, and she smiled and waved brightly, wearing a hat and a heavy coat, and mittens. Harry’s heart was warm and full-he felt a palpable relief at the sight of her bright brown eyes and fiery red hair providing something bright to focus on through the gloom. She was a Weasley, and her presence invoked memories of his happiest times and a feeling of safety, with the only wizard family who had taken him under their wing, from the first. On her own merits, the sight of her invoked memories of blissful kisses on sunny afternoons with no demands.  
“And I was worried that I was late!” she said.  
“I was, too! I ran out of the castle, scandalized some portraits,” he said.  
Ginny laughed. “As long as you didn’t step on any first years,” she added.  
“Or house elves,” Harry contributed.  
“Oh, no! Hermione would surely have your head,” Ginny said.  
“Did I ever show you those S.P.E.W. buttons she made me and Ron in fourth year?” Harry said.

“Buttons?!” Ginny crowed, and as they walked the rest of the way to the Fountain, Harry regaled her with the story of Hermione asking him and Ron to wear S.P.E.W. buttons, and Ron’s consternation. He instinctively reached for the door, but then remembered that Dean holding doors for her unnecessarily had been her chief complaint about him, and hastily let go.  
“God damn it!” Ginny howled, as the wooden door hit her in the nose.  
Harry felt as if everything happened quickly, and yet he was viewing it in slow motion.  
“What the Hell were you thinking?!” Ginny demanded sharply, sounding eerily like Mrs. Weasley when she was in a temper. She was grasping her nose. Harry wanted to do something to help or soothe her, and touched her shoulder. She shrugged him off, shaking her shoulder pointedly.  
Ginny howled in pain.  
“Why did you slam a bloody door in my face?!” Ginny howled through her cupped hands.  
“I didn’t!” Harry said.  
“Well, it wasn’t a cream pie, was it?” Ginny snapped.  
“I thought you wouldn’t like it! You didn’t like it when Dean helped you through the portrait hole!” he said.  
“What?!” Ginny snapped, and then howled, “my nose….! How does this hurt worse than getting hit with a Bludger?”  
“Because Bludgers go for the head. At least concussions knock you out cold, you don’t have to feel the worst of it,” Harry pointed out.  
“Shut up and let me feel the worst of it in peace, then!” Ginny barked.  
They’d never really had a disagreement, before, and Harry felt small and childish in the wake of Ginny’s ferocious anger. On the one hand, he knew that he had earned it, but he didn’t necessarily enjoy the weight of the knowledge that at least for the moment, she thought he was a blooming idiot. He felt as if a truck’s passing wheels had splattered him in mud. Then, suddenly, he remembered something that actually could help.  
“Wait a minute, I can fix it. Move your hands from your nose,” he said.  
Ginny did so, and Harry waved his wand over her bloody nose and cast, “Episkey,” as Tonks had done for him, two years before.  
“Ouch!” Ginny said.  
“All fixed?” Harry asked hopefully.  
“No! It just hurts more. What the Hell is wrong with you?” Ginny demanded.  
“I was trying to fix it,” Harry said.  
“By fix, I reckon you mean ‘disfigure,’” she said coldly. “maybe the landlady here can help.”  
She pushed the door open herself, and entered the teahouse. It was a more subtle space than Madam Puddifoots, with plushy looking antique furniture and a fireplace, which threw warmth as they walked in. The landlady, who was wearing a green silk 18th century round gown, greeted them with first a smile and then alarm.  
“Oh, dear! Were you two attacked by bandits?” she said, rushing over to Ginny.  
“No, they saw the state of me and decided I had enough to be getting on with,” Ginny said coldly, and Harry felt another smart of guilty embarrassment. He wished he’d held the bloody door, but he was sure that she wouldn’t have liked it. He’d gotten his signals crossed, with lamentable results.  
“Come here, dear, let’s see what we can do. I’m Laudine, by the way,” said the landlady. She extracted her wand from a pocket in her gown, waved it, and said, “Episkey,” as Harry had done.  
“I tried that spell, it didn’t work,” Harry said.  
Laudine nodded, unsurprised. “It’s a tricky wand motion. Hard to get right on your first try,” she said.  
“It wasn’t my first try,” Harry said.  
“Charms can be subtle,” Laudine said patiently.  
“Just leave it off,” Ginny grumbled at him, then turned to Laudine, and said, “Can I use your loo, and get this blood off me?”  
She looked like she had been playing rugby blindfolded. Harry could only take so much offense at her sour mood with him, as he had let the door hit her face.  
Laudine, at least, gave him a sympathetic half smile, after nodding her acquiescence to Ginny. Ginny went off to the lavatory.  
“You two could both use some peppermint tea. It helps one…digest things,” Laudine said.  
“Erm…okay,” Harry said. He hadn’t even eaten, yet, but it was a generous offer.  
“On the house-in honor of the day,” Laudine added, and walked back around the counter, busying herself making the tea.  
Harry had a feeling it was really in honor of sympathy, but, again, he wasn’t arguing. He couldn’t believe that the muddy guilt and embarrassment he felt now had transpired in less than an hour since he had felt so buoyed and hopeful in conversation with Luna. Winter didn’t suit his and Ginny’s relationship-they had never had cause to be annoyed with each other tumbling in the grass by the lake in spring and early summer…  
She returned from the lavatory around the same time as Laudine set their steaming porcelain cups of peppermint tea on a small, round, wooden table between two fireside armchairs. Ginny smiled at the encouraging sight of hot tea, and shucked off her coat. She was wearing a sweater her mum had made, bearing a large letter ‘G’ on the front, and all the blood had been cleared from her face. Harry tentatively smiled back. He was sure that she was going to apologize for the way she had spoken to him earlier.  
“You can do real damage with a teashop door. Maybe it can be your specialty in the Aurors,” Ginny said dryly.  
Harry cringed inwardly. “They’d have to accept me first, wouldn’t they?” he said.  
Ginny frowned in surprise. “They didn’t? But, Kingsley…”  
“He said that I had to get over everything with Voldemort, first,” Harry said.  
Ginny looked surprised, but he could see her digesting this in her bright brown eyes.  
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I suppose so.”  
Harry stared at the fire a bit and waited. He hadn’t expected that. He had hesitated to tell Ginny. It was harder, somehow, than telling Ron and Hermione. But, he now realized that whenever he did tell her, he had expected her to react with indignation on his behalf…to say that Kinglsey had been wrong about him, to trust his instincts that being an Auror was the career for him.  
“You suppose so?” Harry repeated.  
“Well,” she said, pausing to take a sip of her tea, “He’s the best, isn’t he? He knows what it takes to be an Auror. Maybe waiting a bit will make you even better at it than you could be, now.”  
“It didn’t feel like that. It felt like he thinks there’s something wrong with me,” Harry said.  
“Only your depth perception, and your grip-weak wrists, apparently,” Ginny said, but with a teasing smirk at her lips and glint in her eye.  
Harry usually appreciated how she brushed things off with a quip or a joke, but he didn’t feel like laughing at either of his failures-letting the door fly in her face, or his denied Auror application. As soon as he’d learned what an Auror was, at the age of 14, it was the only wizard career he had dreamed of, prepared for, or learned anything about. He wasn’t prepared for anything else, and nothing else felt quite right. Ginny didn’t seem to see how important it was. He realized that he felt…disappointed. That he had expected her to somehow give him the same sense of hope that Luna had.  
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the one that owes her a nice date after breaking her nose,’ Harry reminded himself.  
What, he cast his thoughts about, wondering, would be a romantic thing to do?  
He’d seen Ron tuck a stray brown curl of Hermione’s behind her ear, once, when she was engrossed in studying. She looked up, her brown eyes met his blue eyes, and she had smiled, a deep, slowly spreading smile that lit her face like a gradually rising dawn.  
Harry reached across the small table between their two chairs, and made to tuck a lock of Ginny’s hair, the same color as the waving flames in the fireplace before them, behind her small, shell-shaped ears…  
But, instead, he knocked her tea out of her hand and into her lap. Ginny looked up at the roof of the Fountain and screamed with her mouth open in a wide ‘O’.  
Harry reached for his wand, and pointed it at Ginny’s lap, but she said, “Don’t you dare! I don’t want you botching any tricky charms in that area, if you don’t mind!”  
“I’m sorry!” Harry said.  
“What were you playing at this time?” Ginny snapped.  
Harry felt his nerves fray. She had every right to be annoyed with his faux pas, but she also didn’t seem to understand that he didn’t mean to do any of them. Where was the girl who had understood that he didn’t mean to hurt Malfoy so grievously, that had defended him when Hermione told him he was wrong about the Prince, who had gone out and won the Quidditch Cup as Harry himself would have done if he hadn’t been banned from the team, yet again? Ginny had not upbraided him once, even when he broke up with her to hunt Voldemort’s Horcruxes. Their relationship had been the one place in his life where he didn’t feel thwarted or challenged…she always had jokes and kisses to make his complicated life momentarily bright.

“I was trying to…fix your hair…” Harry mumbled.  
She shot him a murderous look that made her eyes a darker shade of brown, and reminded him, once again, of Mrs. Weasley at her most furious.  
“First you break my nose, than you scald me with hot tea-if you want to break up, just say so, instead of trying to do me an injury!” Ginny said.  
“Break up? Why would I want to break up?” Harry said, horrified at the word.  
But, in the midst of his horror was a sudden understanding that he had known only when he was trying to solve one of the mysteries that had always lead, one way or another, to Voldemort. This time, he and Ginny, and the state of their relationship, were at the heart of the matter. That was why he had thought of Dean, and her reason for breaking up with him: deep down, he knew that they hadn’t been quite as close since getting back together after the war, that those sunlit days and kisses in lonely corridors of the school were long ago.  
“Yes, why would you want to give up our weekly snogging appointment, the only time you seem to remember I exist?” Ginny said coldly.  
“I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve been trying to…figure things out. What I’m going to do, after Hogwarts, where I’m going to go. I….I don’t know what to do. Where to go. If I can’t be an Auror…what am I going to do?” Harry said.  
“Harry…I don’t have that answer. But, if you’d talk to me about it, maybe we could come up with one,” Ginny said. “No matter how many times we kiss, I’m not any closer to you, am I? I’ll never be the person you tell everything to, not like Ron, or Hermione…”  
“I didn’t want to ruin things. When I’m with you…its got nothing to do with stuff like that. Its fun,” Harry said desperately.  
Ginny laughed humorlessly, and said, “Oh, I’m a bit of fun?”  
“No, no!” Harry said humorlessly. “What do you want me to say?”  
“I wanted to know you….but, its driving me crazy, that you don’t really confide in me. Do you just want sex? Do you think I’m stupid, or weak? Why don’t you ever trust me with anything important?” Ginny said.  
Harry could tell she had been thinking all these things for a long time. No wonder it had all come out at once, in her vicious sarcasm.  
“I don’t think anything like that. Ginny…I thought you were happy, too,” Harry said.  
“Then either you don’t know much about happiness, or much about me,” Ginny said.  
It had never occurred to him that Ginny wanted him to ruin their stolen moments of kissing and touching each other with heavy conversations about Harry’s darkest thoughts. He told Hermione and Ron, and even Luna, those things because they were his friends, and talking to friends usually made one feel better. If advice couldn’t be had, there was at least the solace of solidarity. As he looked at Ginny’s frustrated frown, staring at the fire, he realized that he had never treated her that way, nor she him. They’d come close to friendship , then withdrew, avoiding each other as their physical attraction grew, because she was dating another boy. Their rare moments alone were taken up with venting that desire, stolen kisses or suggestive looks that recalled moments of physical intimacy. When they talked, it was fluffy banter.  
He’d treasured the respite from depth that his relationship with Ginny gave him, but that was the very thing that was making her unhappy.  
Harry looked at her, at the flames, at the mugs of tea. They were grown up, now. They would soon be leaving Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade, and all the familiar routines of seven years behind, for good. They’d run out of time to hide from the world, or from themselves.  
“It wasn’t just sex, Ginny. I wasn’t trying to cut you out, or hide things from you. I just wanted to be happy, somewhere, with somebody. I reckon you think you’ve put up with enough from me,” Harry said, and at the end of his sentence was a quaking hope that she would say that they could start over.  
“Sometimes I feel like you’re not who I thought you were. But, you are….You really are a hero, Harry. And that’s rather lonely, isn’t it? And it makes it hard to be anything else,” she said, with a tired sigh.  
“I guess heroes aren’t the best boyfriends,” Harry said.  
Ginny didn’t disagree. They both took a deep drink of their peppermint tea, which was, after all, meant to help one digest things.

February was frigid, but short. A few sunny days managed to sneak onto the calendar, giving the students of Hogwarts and residents of Hogsmeade a preview of spring in the Highlands…the last, for Harry and his friends. Hermione secured an internship at a magical law firm in London, and Ron began taking weekend passes to leave Hogwarts for the weekend to help George out at the joke shop, returning in time for class Monday morning. Ginny, with help from Slughorn, was recommended to his old pupil Gwenog Jones; after a tryout, she made it to the Harpies practice squad. Harry had no doubts that she would be on the main roster before long, and wished her well.  
As the sky became brighter, the days became warmer, and Harry watched the familiar rhythms of life at Hogwarts play out, for him, at least, for the last time, he pondered what Shacklebolt had told him, and began to understand subtly the difference between living for a cause, and dying for him. This was the peace that so many had fought and died for, a world without Voldemort, and the choices and opportunities that had prevented. Harry had not prepared for the variations and variables of that world. He had determined, when he was just a boy, to fight dark wizards or die trying…but this new world, and peace, offered far many more choices than that. Harry realized that he needed to explore them, or he would not belong in this new world.  
“I think I’ll travel for a bit; you know…learn new things,” he told Ron, Hermione, and Ginny, one day, during breakfast in the Great Hall. He could feel Luna’s gray-blue eyes, and knew that she was overhearing him from the Ravenclaw table…and that she was not in the least surprised at his decision.


End file.
